Why Great Powers Expand in Their Own Neighborhood: Explaining the Territorial Expansion of the United States 1819–1848
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article attempts to identify the causes of intraregional great power expansion. Using the state-to-nation balance theory we argue that, in many cases, such great power expansion can be explained as being the result of the incongruence within a given region between the nationalist aspirations and identities of the various peoples inhabiting it and the region's division into territorial states. The existence of the external type of such incongruence within a great power (that is, a pan-nationalist ideology) turns it into a revisionist state eager to expand, using all means available, in order to “resolve” this incongruence. In addition, this incongruence also creates various nationalistic trans-border groups (like terrorists, private military expeditions/filibusters, settlers, etc.). Often these groups try, through various independent efforts (usually in nearby weak states), to achieve these revisionist goals as well, thus complementing and aiding the revisionist great power's own efforts. After demonstrating the weaknesses in other existing explanations, this argument is illustrated in the case of the territorial expansion by the United States in the Southwest at the expense of Mexico in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".